I went to the Blog part of this site, and a message appears in a transparent overlay at top of the page:

"This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services, to personalise ads and to analyse traffic. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies."

Why on earth does this site *need* to use cookies from a 3rd party advertising company?

The blog uses the Blogger service from Google, so I guess it's just forced on us by them. In this case it's not a 3rd party advertising company but the very company that hosts the blog.

I guess there have always been such cookies, but most likely something changed in the US to force Google to tell us about it (like it's being done in Europe). If you check other *.blogspot.* blogs, they all have the same notification.

For historic reasons (the blog came way before the forum) it is hosted there and by now (and also taking into account how rarely it is currently updated) it isn't really worth to set it up on a better self-hosted platform. But we are well aware that having the blog on a privacy intruding and non-FOSS host runs a bit against the spirit of this site.

andrewj {l Wrote}:A bit surprising there are no good FOSS software for blogs, when there are several high-quality softwares for forums (like SMF and phpBB). Let's hope somebody takes up the challenge

Sacrilege!

WordPress and Drupal (though that's less blog-oriented) are behemoths with enormous ecosystems around them and modified versions that do much more than most Linux distros. More recently popular is Ghost.There are lots of other more lightweight CMSs which are less well-knownj but nonetheless active. Recent ones include Anchor and Bolt. I wouldn't go with these though as they lack the critical mass of WordPress, Drupal and Ghost

Yeah, sorry for the misunderstanding. Sure there are great FOSS blogging platforms, but back in 2006 (I only joined the team a few years later) blogger must have been the best choice I guess, and everyone has been a bit reluctant to jump ship since then. I feel the forum has become much more important by now anyways, so not a big deal...

Back in 2006, I was also blogging about freeware games. So the blog evolved into a FOSS game blog from a free game blog.

Also I didn't have a server, nor wanted to mess about too much maintaining one, and it was the quickest way to get it online. IIRC wordpress.com wasn't quite so well done back then. Blogger was the easiest of the options for me to get started with something that I wanted. Many of the others stuffed ads or big headers onto the blog, or were really lacking in features.